Work, the four letter word

I've self-imposed a minicrunch for this week in order to ensure I hit a project milestone that involves this cutscene stuff I've been working on. The week out for E3 set things back a bit further than I would have liked, and I'm going to have to really push hard to get to where I want to be. This is especially important in light of my upcoming trip to the main office, where I'll undoubtedly be grilled in person on my progress [smile]

The goal for the end of this week is to be showing live renders of "dummy" scenes that just have colored blobs moving around and doing their stuff. So far, I have everything ready to go except for two key features: loading a cutscene from XML data, and actually drawing the blobs. Going from the blobs to full-on rendering will be a fairly minor step, and having the dummy-render demo ready will really let me show off the power of the architecture I've been building.

At the moment, I'm copying off some asset files from the main repository so I can run the latest build of the game. I don't actually have any testable code at the moment because I have no way to load my test scene (aside from hardcoding the class instantiations, which I really would rather avoid), but I'll need a running test environment anyways, and now's as good a time as any to get that taken care of.

The next tickbox on my agenda is to update our wiki with proper details on how this thing works, and revise a few areas that have changed in design as I've been writing actual code. Once that is done, it's on to XML loading.

The XML bit will actually be a bit of a pain because I first have to create a proper XML schema, and then convert my on-paper dummy test scene into the corresponding XML format. That unfortunately will probably take a fair chunk of time in and of itself, which is going to make it dangerously hard to get finished and ready for rendering and debugging before the end of the week.

But hey, what's life without challenges? And who needs to sleep, anyways?